


Turn and Face the Strange

by isaac richard (isaacrichard)



Category: That '70s Show
Genre: (lots of smoking), Acceptance, Awkward Conversations, Coming Out, Coming of Age, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship/Love, Gen, Happy Ending, Homophobic Language, Light Angst, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Recreational Drug Use, Smoking, copious use of 70s references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:20:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26187838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isaacrichard/pseuds/isaac%20richard
Summary: Eric has learned by now – strange isn't always synonymous with bad.
Relationships: Eric Forman & Steven Hyde, Eric Forman/Donna Pinciotti, Eric Forman/Steven Hyde, Kitty Forman/Red Forman
Comments: 4
Kudos: 78





	Turn and Face the Strange

**Author's Note:**

> blame this fic on a stoned netflix binge. pls enjoy <3  
> titled from changes by david bowie
> 
> also: there's weed and cigs and swearing, as i am not limited by cable censorship :)

“Have you seen what the fags are up to?”

Eric freezes with a piece of bacon half shoved into his mouth, feeling like a gigantic knot had tied itself with his intestines. Red _knows_. He knows, and he’s always known, and he’s about to throw Eric out on the street with his scrambled eggs still steaming on his plate.

But it’s just like all the other times Eric had been deadly sure Red had _known,_ whether it had been about pot stashes or nudie magazines. Kitty titters something about the rudeness of the slur, especially at Sunday breakfast, and Eric murmurs a soft agreement. Conversation keeps moving, the earth keeps turning. The knot begins to undo.

Red rolls his eyes. “The homos, then. Have you seen?”

Kitty bites, after a moment, because Eric sure as hell isn’t about to. He pretends to be inordinately busy with his piece of toast. “What have I seen, dear?”

Red fluffs up his newspaper like a hen would her feathers, bringing the boldened headline into view.

**Win for Lesbians and Gay Men: Housing Rights to Move Forward in Wisconsin Superior Courts**

“They’re letting them buy houses now,” Red says, with an air of superiority. He clicks his tongue. “You remember ’69, Kitty. It’s just going to be another mess.”

“I think it’s wonderful,” Kitty says, and Eric has never loved his mother more than he does in this moment. He has yet to break into the conversation, firmly focused on the toast he’s still pretending to eat, but he hadn’t dared expect anything positive from this.

“Kitty – “

“No,” Kitty murmurs, and that’s of note in and of itself. She rarely disagrees with her husband so outwardly. “Everyone deserves a place to live, I don’t care who it is. Now, Eric, sweetheart – you had said something about needing money for school, isn’t that right?”

That gives Red something else to bitch about, and the subject is replaced. The earth keeps on turning, but it’s not quite as balanced as it had been before.

He doesn’t let himself wonder how Donna found out. He doesn’t want to leave himself asking if it’s just that obvious, or if it’s because it’s _Donna,_ the girl who had gone to bat for him since they were practically fetuses. He can’t decide which option is worse.

What he really doesn’t want to do is talk about it, which is exactly what Donna seems ready to do.

“I’ll still marry you,” he mutters, not looking anywhere near her. Because even though they hadn’t really discussed it, they both knew that’s what everyone expected. He’s stoned enough to have forgotten the smoldering joint pinched in his fingers, as he says this, but he does mean what he says. He would still marry her.

It’s just them in the infamous basement, as Donna always got preferential treatment on school nights.

She didn’t always smoke – and Eric might have refrained, under different circumstances. But he couldn’t do this shit sober. “If you want me to.” 

“For you just to be unhappy for the rest of your life?” she murmurs, her whole face gone too soft.

She’s speaking just like Kitty, with that gentle, cloying edge. And Eric realizes suddenly, with all the subtlety of a brick to the face, that this is Donna the Adult. This is Donna the Grown Woman, not his childhood friend, or long-time puppycrush.

She was thinking of The Rest Of It, of what happens when high school ends and the basement becomes too small for their large young-adult lives. And of course, Red wouldn’t put up with them forever, but Eric had known that for years. He had simply refused to dwell too deeply on it, yet.

Donna wants two-point-five kids and a golden retriever, a white picket fence and a basketball hoop. She wants Sunday brunch and Fourth of July picnics. She wants to fall into the same suburban trap as their parents, and their parents before them.

Eric doesn’t know what he wants – but he knows, for damn sure, that it’s not that. He doesn’t just want what he’s always known. What would be the point? Never changing, never getting any better or worse? To live in monotony, and then die?

She takes the joint from him, sucks on it deeply, and puts it out. Which was probably the smartest thing either of them had done that night. Smoke plumes from her pretty pink mouth, and she doesn’t cough, impressively.

“We’re breaking up,” Eric says suddenly. He’s slow from the pot, he realizes, and would have seen this coming sober. He can’t say he doesn’t deserve it.

Donna’s eyes shine with unshed tears. He hopes that’s the pot, too. “Yeah.”

“It’s for real this time, isn’t it?” His voice hitches, and he longs to get the joint going again. The comfortable haze is clearing, and he desperately wants it back.

“I love you, Eric,” Donna murmurs. Hearing it doesn’t thrill him like he always imagined it would.

She spares a glance to the outside door, where the sun is hanging low enough to cast the basement in dim orange, long stretches of shadow. “It’s getting late. I’ll see you tomorrow, alright?”

He doesn’t meet her eyes. “Yeah. See you.” 

He lights the joint again once she’s gone.

“I’m not as bummed about it as I thought I’d be,” Eric mutters. The basement is blue with smoke – Kitty and Red are out for the night. “Is that stupid?”

Hyde shrugs. Hyde is indifferent, always indifferent, behind his shades. Hyde makes Eric feel strangely warm when he leans over him to snatch a few chips and says, “Bitches, man. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Hyde’s a lot stoned and a little confused looking, like he’s not quite sure what he just said. He laughs at nothing at all, or maybe at himself, or Eric. Nobody’s sure, but almost immediately, they’re all laughing together.

Eric feels a heady hit of warmth that he chalks up to the booze and dope – and nothing to do with how… _endearing_ Hyde looks, laughing his ass off like a fucking idiot, arms crossed over his stomach like he can’t contain his glee.

Eric thinks he might be pink in the face, and also chalks that up to being high. And knowing that he’s wrong, dead-as-a-doorknob, royally screwed, wrong, in the tiny corner where his itty-bitty teenage reasoning lives.

“Isn’t this, like, the three hundredth time you guys have ended it?” Kelso says, still snickering in that dopey way of his. His pupils are huge in his dark doe eyes, stupidly pretty in a way he’s probably not even aware of.

And – they had broken up more like, four times, but no one wanted to listen to that. Didn’t make as good of a joke. “What makes you so sure she won’t be back?”

_Because she figured out that I’m a faggot._ The thought sobers him a significant amount, and he stops laughing. He clears his throat. “I just know, dude, okay?”

Kelso shrugs, already given up the subject. He was as off again with Jackie as he was on, so he at least knew he had no room to talk. Eric figured Kelso thought they would really get back together – that the truth would shock him, this time.

Hyde, on the other hand, gives him a long, strange look. Like he too, knows something. The knot in his stomach is back, his throat closing up like a boa constrictor from the inside out. He coughs, but it’s not the pot. He feels like he can hardly breathe.

He’s suddenly intensely paranoid Hyde can read minds, has heard him literally admit to being… _that._ But then the moment ends, and they’re talking about the genius of Led Zeppelin – or, Hyde and Kelso are.

Eric feels physically dizzy, as if one look could send his center of gravity heading for the hills. Their critiques of _IV_ sound like they come from twenty meters under the sea. He fumbles for the joint, even though it’s Kelso’s turn. He must have some kind of look on his face, because nobody objects.

“Hey, man,” Hyde’s hanging around the garage, having helped Red sort through old tools – and Eric tries not to think about why his father asked Hyde. Why he always asked Hyde, if it was the kind of thing involving man-to-man talk – something Eric had never been able to wrap his head around.

“Hey,” Eric murmurs, instead of dwelling. He’s begun to feel strange about Hyde, anyway, because Hyde watches him now. Blatantly. He’d seemingly made it a habit, after that first long glance.

The gang goes to get burgers – Hyde’s watching him drive. The guys go out and shitfaced – Hyde observes him as he steadily drinks can after can of stolen Budweiser. He’s always there – always watching – and Eric always means to confront him about it. But he’s refrained.

And he refrains from saying anything because he doesn’t mind it. It was strange, no doubt about that, but Eric had learned by now that strange wasn’t always synonymous with bad. He likes to feel seen – that was the suburban angst, knowing he was just one cookie-cutter kid from the neighborhood out the millions on earth.

But Hyde was different. His family was shit, for one, though that wasn’t a particularly good different. He didn’t trust the government, and he had done more drugs than any of them. He believed in aliens. He hated the war in Vietnam loudly and aggressively, in a world where everyone had already started to become hush-hush about their young men being sent to slaughter just a few years back.

He was tough. He was cool. He had ideas that meant something, sometimes.

Hyde was Eric’s closest friend (Donna excluded, for the time being). He was – offering Eric a cigarette and wondering why there was a dreamy daze in his eyes.

“Oh,” Eric murmurs. He takes the cigarette, fishes his lighter from his pocket. “Thank you.”

“Mm, get mine too,” Hyde replies. “Lost my light. Again.”

Eric flicks the lighter. It had been one of his mom’s, from the last time she had tried to get rid of them all. Eric had simply swiped it from the trash – he was pinching pennies, these days. College wouldn’t pay for itself, and if he didn’t end up going? At least he wouldn’t be broke.

Hyde dips his head forward to light his cig, eyes glowing in the tiny yellow light. Eric’s heart jumps – and he’s not exactly sure why. This wasn’t the first time he had ever lit Hyde’s cigarette, or anyone’s, for that matter.

So why did it feel so different?

“Red finds us out here,” Hyde murmurs, and he’s just talking, because Red’s become one with the couch by now, fully absorbed in the evening news. “We’re dead meat.”

“I’m dead meat,” Eric corrects, moving the flame to his own cigarette. The tobacco sizzles, gone cherry red as he inhales. It burns. Feels good. “You’d get to watch.”

Hyde laughs. “He’d get a few swings on me, too.”

“He probably would,” Eric murmurs, voice soft. He’s nervous, real nervous. He shouldn’t be – it’s fucking Hyde – but he is. Something had shifted, between Donna breaking it off and now. Their best-friendship was getting increasingly messy, and Eric wished it would all just slow down so he could catch his breath.

“Eric – “ 

When was the last time Hyde used his first name?

“I’m gay,” Eric mutters, staring hard at his shoelaces. He brings the cigarette to his mouth, toying with it. “Before you say whatever it was you were gonna say. I’m gay.”

Hyde’s expression is hard to read. Eric wishes he’d abandon those shades sometimes – it would make figuring him out at least a little easier.

“Jackie owes me twenty bucks,” Hyde says after a long minute, and Eric rolls his eyes. Of course, they had a bet going. He wouldn’t have expected anything less than class from those two.

“I was going to ask if you were still messed up about Donna, but I guess that answers that,” Hyde mutters. He inhales deeply, exhales hard. Smoke comes from his nose in a puff, bright white in the cold.

_Like a dragon,_ Eric thinks, in the part of him that’s still five years old.

“I’m sorry,” Eric says. He takes a long drag off his own cigarette, not even completely understanding why he feels the need to apologize. “I’m really sorry, dude.”

Hyde’s face sort of crumples, his eyebrows pressed hard together. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Eric’s fighting the urge to cry. “I don’t know,” his voice sounds strained to his own ears. “Sorry for telling you.”

“I’m your friend,” Hyde declares, and it’s about the least emotionally constipated thing he’s ever said. “You don’t need to apologize, man. You – your whole family – has always been there for me. I wouldn’t just fucking peace out on you, over anything. Swear.”

Eric sucks at his bottom lip. Maybe a teeny tiny tear escapes, and he swipes at his eyes, praying to God and Jesus and even Satan, if everyone else was busy – that Hyde lets it go.

“Besides,” Hyde murmurs. Eric looks over at him, at the little quirk of a smile on his lips, working on the end of his cig. “I tell you all the time how irresistible you are.”

And in a stroke of pure teenage bravado, Eric grabs two boney fists full of Hyde’s shirt and crashes their lips together. There’s no finesse, and they both taste of smoke and menthol, burnt. Eric half-expects to get punched, but instead –

Instead, Hyde cradles his jaw. His lips are chapped, his fingers just beginning to bear calluses. He smells like he could stand to take a shower, like he’d been outside sweating, dicking around with the sun on his face.

Instead, Hyde kisses back.

“I have to tell them.”

“You don’t.”

“I _do –_ they’re my parents, I have to tell them. And they’re not even that religious…”

Hyde scoffs from his seat, his legs propped up on the low table. “Any religion is too much religion. Separation of church and state, man.”

Eric snorts. “You’d say that, ya heathen.”

Hyde pushes himself from his seat, his shades dipped low on the bridge of his nose. His dark eyes glitter mischievously. “If I’m a heathen, what does that make you?” He’s in Eric’s space now. “The heathen’s bitch?”

Eric shoves him away, walks around the side of the basement and flops onto the now-drooping couch. Too many asses had been pressed into it over the years, and she was starting to show her mileage. “I won’t be your bitch anymore, if you keep talking like that.”

Hyde barks out a laugh. He scales the side of the couch and falls in next to Eric. “For real, though, you don’t have to tell them,” he murmurs, kind. Kinder than he was with anybody else, even Donna. He smells like cheap cologne – _did he put that on for me?_ “It’s your life, babe. Not theirs.”

And Eric appreciates that sentiment – because it was true, his life did not belong to Kitty and Red. But they belonged _in_ his life; something that Hyde didn’t agree with, because of his own dysfunctional family unit.

But Eric’s parents had done nothing but love him, even if the love could get a little tough, on Red’s end. He knew disappearing without a trace would break their hearts – Kitty’s, especially, who doted on him more than she ever did his sister (at least, in Eric’s infallible memory).

Which worked out because Kitty was Eric’s favorite, too.

And the only reason he’d ever disappear without a trace, would be if they reacted badly. But on the other hand, if he ever wanted to be truthful with them again, he knew he couldn’t keep it secret.

Eric drops his head onto Hyde’s shoulder, feels Hyde shimmy to accommodate him. He wraps an arm around Eric’s shoulders. “They deserve to know,” Eric murmurs, his eyes sliding closed.

“Forman, dude, have you seen –“

Eric’s head shoots up as Hyde scrambles to separate them, vaulting himself over the couch like Jesse Owens. He topples into his usual seat, heaving, as Fez, Kelso, Jackie, and Donna file in through the door.

“Oh, there’s Hyde,” Kelso says. “C’mon, we gotta go!”

"Yes, let's be going," Fez chimes in. "In my country, making your friends wait is a dick move."

Eric’s head spins. He has no memory of any plans they might have made. “Wha?”

“The drive in,” Jackie squeals. “Duh!”

“One night only double feature,” Donna pipes up. “Man, how’d you two forget? We’ve been talking about this for weeks.”

Oh, yeah. They had. And Eric was designated driver.

Hyde stands. His cheeks are pink – which, to anyone else, wouldn’t mean much, but Eric can’t look away. “You kids have fun,” he says, voice only slightly strained. He pushes his shades up his nose bridge. Hiding his eyes, Eric notes. “I’m busy tonight.”

“Asshole,” Donna says. Eric hopes it’s his imagination, but she seemed to be looking back and forth between Hyde and himself. He hopes it’s his imagination, so he doesn’t have to consider what that probably means. “Ditching asshole.”

“That’s me,” Hyde says, and opens the door. From behind the gang, he catches Eric’s eye, and winks.

“Mom?”

Kitty turns from collecting the laundry, a big, warm smile on her face. There are curlers in her hair already – or maybe it was later in the evening than Eric had thought. He had been holed up in the basement for hours, mulling over how to approach his mother, when she had oh-so-helpfully appeared before him.

“Yes, honey?” She’s the sincerest person Eric’s ever met. She’s smiling like he just told her he paid off their mortgage, holding one of his shirts in her hand. He doesn’t want to disappoint her – has never wanted to disappoint her, unlike how he sometimes went out of his way to disappoint Red.

_Out with it, out with it, just fucking say it, Forman, be a man!_

He can barely force it. “How do you feel about gay people?” It comes out as one word, _howdoyoufeelaboutgaypeople._

Ah, shit. _Swing and a miss, Forman._

Kitty’s tiny brows knit together. She sets his shirt on the dryer, turns to him. “Is this about what your father said a few weeks back?”

No. No, it wasn’t. Eric had forgotten about that, actually, because it wasn’t that unusual of a conversation. Red was intolerant of his own neighbors, let alone people so different from him.

“Well, you know he doesn’t mean those things, dear,” Kitty says. She perches herself next to him on the couch, pats her son’s shoulder. “Your father… He’s your father. But he holds no ill will towards anyone. He should definitely think before he speaks sometimes, but…”

“Mom, I’m gay,” Eric mutters, staring not at her, but past her. He bites back the _‘I’m sorry’_ , that bubbles up, because Hyde had told him to, at least, be unapologetic. Not proud – not by any stretch of the imagination – but not letting himself be stepped on, either.

Hyde had good advice; Eric was learning. When he wasn’t being an asshole.

There’s a heavy few seconds where Kitty’s looking at him, and Eric is refusing to look back. When he finally does – only because she very obviously isn’t going anywhere – there are tears rolling down her cheeks.

She pulls him into a hug. The kind of hug he hasn’t allowed since he was in grade school, maybe even before that, but it’d be fifty kinds of wrong to shove her off right now. He hugs back, instead. He’s happy to even be allowed to do that much.

“You are my only son,” Kitty sniffles. She’s still holding on tight. “And I love you, always, and no matter what.”

Three days later, Red stops Eric on his way to the basement. His expression is impossible to read – if Eric tried, he’d find nothing but the same kind of peeved indifference Red always had.

“Son,” Red says. He clears his throat, squares his shoulders. “I just want you to know… I’m proud of you. Your mother and I both are. Just keep your nose clean, and we’ll stay proud, alright?”

Eric blinks. What the fuck did _that_ mean? “Y-yes. Yes, sir.”

“Good,” Red says. He claps Eric on the shoulder. “Good chat, Eric.”

He watches as Red turns on his heel for the living room, and decides, pointedly, that he’s going to leave it just like that. There was such a thing as pushing your luck, after all.

“What the hell took you so long?” Hyde asks, feigning irritable as he turns to watch Eric come down the stairs.

Eric shakes his head, throws Hyde the soda he had asked for.

Hyde catches it easily. “Well?”

“I dunno, dude,” Eric mumbles. He slides onto the couch next to Hyde, who wordlessly wraps an arm around his waist. “Really weird conversation with my dad just now.”

“You think Kitty told him?” Hyde asks. He cracks open the soda, peering at Eric over it. His shades are nowhere to be found.

Eric shrugs. “Probably. But he said… he said he was _proud_ of me. That’s what was weird.”

Hyde laughs. “When was the last time he’s said that?”

“Never,” Eric says, even though that wasn’t completely true. But it had never sounded so honest, genuine. Like he gave a shit.

Hyde kisses his cheek. “I think you’re gonna be fine, man. They’re good people. And you’re not on the street yet, anyway.”

That was true. “Yeah,” Eric agrees. “It’s strange, but… I think this was for the best. Thanks, Hyde.”

Hyde grins, brilliant, and Eric has half a mind to kiss it off him. “Anytime, babe.”


End file.
